Blessed by the Potato

It was kind of a shock when Eastown Pizza closed down, as they had some pretty good, fairly unique pizza (though it was a little pricey for the university crowd). Shortly after they closed, a new joint opened up in their space by the campus: Mustang Pizza. I was hoping that they managed to get some of the equipment and recipes from the bankruptcy, and that I could still get Eastown pizza, just under a new name. It’s been a few months, but I finally went out and gave them a try tonight.

Oh my god, they are terrible. I was quite hungry after rushing around to send off a grant today, and I couldn’t even finish a slice, it was just that bad. The crust had a decent flavour, but was far too thin to support the rest of the pizza (bring a spoon), and was very, very soggy. The worst part by far though was the cheese. It was basically cheese slice cheese. It gooped up far more than pizzeria cheese should, and stuck to my fingers when I tried to pick a bit off. This thing was drowning in this terrible cheese, there was about twice as much cheese as there was crust.

So, heed my warning and stay away from Mustang Pizza.

We went to the Fanshawe Pioneer Village’s Haunted Hayride last night, which featured “Polidori’s Vampyre”, a short play put on as the hayride made its rounds. The setup and execution was kind of neat: to get a bunch of people run through simultaneously, the play was broken up into four different stations. The four trailers would all rotate between the station and park while the actors carried out each scene, then the trailers would move on. Each time we changed stations, a new group of actors played the same characters, which I found confusing at the 2nd station (right after our first change!) when a new character was introduced (they warned us about the setup at the beginning, and introduced us to the 4 main characters in the “prologue”, but this character wasn’t included in that group). The performances varied a fair bit from actor to actor, as one might expect in these situations, and the cast was rather female-heavy (only two male characters, and they still had a female cross-dress one at half the stations), but I suppose that’s to be expected in a student drama group. A lot of the kids had good screams, growls, and undead-rising abilities. There were some issues with the split, simultaneous station method: at one point, our station was a few seconds behind the others, and we could clearly hear the other actors screaming out the lines from down the way…

The plot, however, sucked.

To outline it in full (with spoilers, though no one should really care since tonight was the last performance so it’s not like you can go and see it yourself):

Our 19th century hero, John, has returned from England and brought along a strange travelling companion: Lord Ruthven (note: I can’t for the life of me remember what it actually was). John’s sister and mother are glad he’s back, and are hoping he can help because strange, evil things have been happening in the new world while he’s been abroad. Then, John’s sister somehow has a baby who’s going blind and needs help. She hears that Lord Ruthven is wealthy and gives out money to druggies and miscreants, and asks him to help pay for a doctor who might be able to restore her son’s sight. He refuses, saying her cause is too noble, and that he prefers a story with a fall from grace. Lord Ruthven leaves, and John enters to talk with his sister, who tells him that she thinks Lord Ruthven might have a dark side to him. John defends his travelling companion.

Later, we see John and his new girlfriend talking. He is haughty and condescending to her rural upbringing as she tries to warn him of an evil in the woods, and not to ride through there after twilight. He says that he has a fast horse and a sharp dagger, and will not indulge her superstitions. As John heads off for the woods, we see Lord Ruthven chasing after the girl with a mad, hungry look on his face. The next scene, of course, takes us to said woods, where it’s night time, John’s horse has run off, and he’s lost his dagger due to theft or negligence. All he has left is the cross his girlfriend gave him to help keep him safe. He meets up with Lord Ruthven, as they come upon the body of his dead girlfriend. Lord Ruthven tries to tell him to be a man, to not be afraid of the woods, and to stop being so sad over the loss of the farmgirl, when they run into two bandits. While John tries to hand over what he has left, Lord Ruthven starts a fight, and manages to run them off… but not before taking a dagger in the back. John’s struggle with the other bandit focuses around the theft of his cross, and from the acting it’s not clear whether that bandit was trying to take the cross as something valuable (as protection from the vampires?) or is reeling in pain from touching it and trying to throw it away. The bandit runs off quickly, either way, and John has it again in the next scene.

As Lord Ruthven he dies (“as a melancholy lad, I prepared words for just this occasion, but find that when the moment is finally upon me, I have nothing to say”) he makes one very strange request of John: not to tell anyone of his death for a year and a day. Then, presumably a year later, John has gone mad over the death of his girlfriend and travelling companion, and his sister and mother are making preparations for the former’s wedding, wondering if John will be fit to attend. John seems to be a little frazzled, but well enough to talk to his sister about the affair — and realizes that he’s never even met the groom (no mention is made of what happened to the baby and the baby’s father). Then his sister shows him a picture of her fiance: the very dead Lord Ruthven. John screams that her wedding will lead only to ruination, that he’s a monster, etc., but his family thinks he’s mad and troops off to the wedding.

Finally, in the only remotely creepy scene (right before this, a kid on our wagon asked “can we go on the haunted hayride after this?”) John finds that he’s the only human left in the village. Everyone gathers around him in the wake of the wedding, and they all close in on him until it turns into a vampire death pile. After which, Lord Ruthven addresses the audience, and the vampires get up from their feast on John and chase the wagons with snarls and growls and evil cackling laughs as the hayride makes a hasty getaway.

All-in-all, a pretty lame show without much in the way of suspense.

Right off the bat, the play got onto the wrong foot by trying to follow two pretty much mutually exclusive story lines. The first involved the evil happening out in the woods, the demonic rituals. These had apparently been happening for some time before John and Lord Ruthven arrived from England. In that case, it could have turned into a neat story about being trapped in the village, the fear of the woods and the dark, and been kind of spooky and scary that way. It’s a storyline that would have lent itself well to having people jump out of the woods and scream as we drove by. The second and beginning of the third scenes really seemed to be playing to this type of story.

The other storyline surrounded the mysterious Lord Ruthven, who was to the audience obviously “the” vampire. He was pale, dressed creepy, of the aristocracy, and had strange, evil, tastes. The end of the third scene and the “twist” in the fourth were definitely playing to this storyline, which would have been more thrilling and creepy than scary and nightmarish. However, this storyline was severely weakened by having evil things in the woods predate the pair’s arrival from Europe (it could have perhaps been fixed by having Lord Ruthven get lost in the woods first and “miraculously return” or somesuch).

It is a little tough to pull something like this off, since there’s only about 25 minutes or so of “stage” time to tell the tale. A narrator might have helped, to introduce new characters or to help mark the passing of time (there seemed to be a fair bit of time between the prologue and scene 1, scene 1 and scene 2, and a lot from 3 to 4. However, 3 seemed to take place on the same night as 2…).

So, I decided to write my own little story that might work with a similar set up (several stations for a hayride, with a short ~5 minute scene at each one).

Polidori’s Werewolf

Intro:

John Polidori has just returned to his rural home town after his first year of university in the city. His high school sweetheart, Isabelle, is glad to see he has made it back safe. Quipping that the journey is not all that dangerous, and barely four days by horseback, he is informed that the woods have become treacherous lately, particularly at night. John says that there was nothing to worry about, his new friend Sam has some family money, and paid for a night in a proper inn for the both of them all the way in, so they never had to camp at night, but chastises his sweetheart for her simple ways. After all, he’s seen the maps and civilization is growing every decade, and now the woods are not so deep and not so distant as when they were children, surely they must be much safer now.

Isabelle continues though, insisting that the woods are dangerous of late. Dogs have been barking and run off into the woods, never to return. Just the other day, one was found dead by his owner, looking like it was half-eaten. This catches the attention of Sam, who is now properly introduced as a student of zoology. He would be most interested in seeing this, as he is not aware of any Canadian predators in the area that have a taste for dog. John’s sister Mary arrives just then to greet him with a warm hug, and is very interested to meet his friend Sam. When she learns of his interest in the goings-on in the woods, she immediately offers to take the pair out to investigate.

The woods:

Here we see the gory remains of a dog’s head and torso. Mary is both disgusted, and delighting in disgusting John. John is concerned with what could have done this to such a large dog. “Wolves, from the looks of it,” says Sam “the tracks in the mud look like two sets of dog prints, one much larger than the other, that could be our wolf and this poor thing here.” Mary starts to wander off then screams, and the other two run to her and move a bush, revealing the other half of the dog. “Interesting,” muses Sam “the best meat, here on the thighs, has been untouched, and the other half, aside from being torn apart, did not look like it served as a meal…” The others question what that could possibly mean. “It might mean that whatever animal did this was interrupted in its kill… or wasn’t killing for food at all.”

“Well,” suggests John “wolves can become territorial, can’t they?” Mary says, flatly, that the wolf must have been possessed by the devil to do that over a patch of forest. Dogs usually nip or fight until the other runs away… Sam suggests that they can be fiercely territorial, especially when mating, but that the violence of what happened to this dog suggests that the wolf may be sick or mad.

“We must get a hunting party together to stop this, before the madness spreads to all the animals of the farms. We’ve got to kill the wolf.”

Howling is then heard, quite loudly and far too close. They all suddenly notice that it’s getting dark out, and that this would be an excellent time to head back in. They run off, terrified, and behind them the bushes shake.

The honeymoon, cut short:

It has been several months, and despite sending out regular hunting parties, the village still hasn’t found the mad wolf. Sam believes that they will have a much better chance of finding it in the fall, when the leaves start to drop and the wolf has fewer places to hide.

John, meanwhile, has married Isabelle, and they are having a last conversation with Sam and Mary before heading off to their honeymoon. Those plans are cut short, however, when a horrible howling and growling sound is heard, followed by the piercing scream of a man. Thundering steps are heard crashing through the foliage, and then the dull thump of someone hitting the ground, and another agonizing scream. The foursome rushes to investigate, and finds one of the village’s hunters panicked and bleeding on the ground. He raves about the beast, the devil itself that is out there. It killed his friend, and it had him in his jaws until the four of them came running. He tries to get up and falls on his face, and asks for their help, and is amazed to find that he is missing an arm. He passes out from the shock, as another round of howling begins. John picks up the gun and herds the women behind him as they all try to make it back to the safety of the village.

A werewolf comes crashing out of the woods at them, snarling and growling. The girls scream and John raises the rifle, but he is attacked first, and it goes flying as the werewolf bites firmly down on his arm, then knocks him to the ground and attacks his leg. Sam grabs the rifle and quickly bashes the beast with the stock, then takes aim as it runs off into the woods. A shot cries out in the night, and a crash is heard in the woods. John calls out in pain, and the two girls start to drag him away to safety.

Months later:

John’s injuries never properly heal, and he cannot return to school. Sam, partly out of loyalty to his friend, and partly out of a desire for Mary, decides to stay in the town and help him out.

They are all shaken by their experience that night, months ago. The body of the wolf was never found, only three hunters. The wife of the one who died from bloodloss after losing his arm knows that one man set out with him, so it becomes unclear whether the third, found dead by a bullet through the heart, was out on his own and got caught in the crossfire, or whether he was the creature. Possessed, perhaps, or cursed, or even something worse. Rumours abound, and while Sam cannot possibly agree with Mary’s superstitious belief in demonic possession turning a man into a wolf creature, he admires the tenacity of her belief, and steals a kiss. Plus, the evidence suggests that the beast is still at large, as animals continue to go missing.

Meanwhile, we find out that Isabelle is pregnant. The pregnancy causes her to wake in the middle of the night though, and then she finds that most disturbingly, John is not there some times. She worries where he might be going, and what he might be doing, particularly since he’s not well enough to be out of bed.

News comes then, as a villager drops by to ask if anyone has seen her husband. He left to use the outhouse near the woods the night before, and never returned…

Months later still:

John is too sick to be out at night, his wounds will not fully close and they burn with the heat of brimstone. Mary and Sam are setting out to join a search party, as now the tenth person has disappeared into the woods. Howling can be heard in the distance almost every night lately, particularly when the full moon is up.

They discuss Isabelle’s recent birth to a baby boy, and how exciting it is and how much love there is between her and John, despite his injuries. “The boy is strange, though” remarks Sam.

“My perfect nephew?! Best watch what you say” retorts Mary.

“Well, he is a good looking boy, I’ll grant you that, but to be born with a full head of hair and teeth is strange. Most strange.”

“Yes, peculiar, but maybe it’s just every other infant in the world who has it wrong. Just think of all the nights Isabelle will get to sleep through since he won’t have to teethe!” Mary exclaims. They walk for a bit in silence. “I would like one of my own one day,” she sighs “it would be so beautiful.”

They stop and Sam touches her cheek “You look so pale and beautiful in the moonlight. And it is such a beautiful moon.” He deliberately points her chin to the sky.

“Yes,” she says “it’s so bright on nights like this, and the air is so crisp, and the sky so clear…”

He pulls a ring out of his pocket while she’s watching the sky, then gets down on one knee. “Mary, I love you with all my heart. Will you marry me?” Before she can respond there is another howl, much closer this time, and a werewolf leaps over the kneeling Sam and flattens Mary. Sam tries to grab the werewolf, but is kicked back to the ground. Mary’s throat is slashed by the beast’s fangs, and then it runs off into the woods, howling.

Sam screams at the moon himself.

Soon after:

Sam pounds on the door to the Polidori home. Isabelle answers, starts to chastise him for the lateness of the hour, and for waking the child, when she sees the redness in his eyes and the madness in his hair. He grabs her and starts to cry, saying that Mary is dead. “Where is John? I must tell him.”

“He should be in bed,” Isabelle begins, but then turns to see that he is not. “Oh no, he’s gone off on another of his sleepwalking adventures. Oh, I’m so sorry Sam, oh Mary! What happened?”

“The beast, Isabelle. The beast got her.” He sobs. “We were going to be married, and she was snatched away from me by its evil jaws…”

John returns, as in a trance, half changed into a werewolf, his clothes covered with blood. “No, no it can’t be…” Sam gasps in horror as John walks by him without seeing, going straight for the door to the bedroom.

Isabelle screams “No, John no, not you!”

“Mary said it was a man, a cursed man, and I didn’t believe her. I’ll make you pay for what you did, you murderer! You killer!” He grabs a rifle, and shoots John through the heart at point blank range. John falls to the ground, and never seems to notice, lost as he is in the transformation.

Isabelle starts to growl at Sam. “John! You killed him!” As Sam turns in surprise to her, the child howls and jumps out of his bed, and the two of them begin to tear Sam limb from limb.

The CBC is reporting on a new traffic light timing scheme that will see pedestrians scramble across the road with traffic stopped in all directions. I’m not quite sure what to make of that. I remember in Kanazawa there was an intersection which a few times stopped all car traffic and let pedestrians cross (there were even separate diagonal crossing walk/don’t walk signals). It seemed really strange and bizarre at the time. For time when intersections can really build up with a backlog of people waiting to cross, I suppose it could help move the pedestrian traffic. It could also make crossing safer since cars won’t be able to turn during the scramble, which is where most close calls seem to come from. But I can’t really say if it would actually help the pedestrians as much as I would guess it would impede the car traffic…

We’ve got a bit of a mold problem in the house here. When we first moved in, we had a water leaking into the basement problem, which lead fairly directly to mold growing in the laundry room. Our landlord did a somewhat sloppy fix of the problem by spraying the leaking wall with blue expanding foam, but it did seem to keep 99% of the water out of the laundry room. However, the mold continues to grow there. It’s a little unsettling, and from what we’ve read on the internet, if mold continues to grow after being killed back by bleach and mold inhibitor a few times, it’s probably there to stay and we’ll need a professional.

It’s a bit of a pain, but the laundry room is at least a fairly localized, stable problem (and is much more livable after we got a UVC lamp to kill the spores and improve the smell).

The rest of the basement is unfinished, and smells terrible. It’s always had a bit of an unfinished-basement, confined-space, stale-mildewy smell to it, and we can smell that whenever the furnace or A/C first clicks on and blows skanky air around the rest of the house. However, that room has gotten much worse in the last few months. Somehow, water is getting in there, and it doesn’t make any damned sense. The interior brick wall (a wall between rooms, not one that faces the outside) is sweating/dripping with water and swelling. When the brick foundation swells and cracks like that, it starts making me a little nervous about the structural integrity of the house as a whole. The smell has gotten much worse as well, along with what looks to be some creeping mold (the mold in the laundry room is white/grey and quite fluffy, the mold in the furnace room doesn’t look nearly as fluffy, more of a scum).

We’ve been complaining to our landlord about it quite a bit, and she has been less than helpful. In fact, she’s been downright batty about the whole thing. She seems to firmly believe that opening windows will solve the problem (never mind that there are only two openable windows in the basement: one of which we were robbed via, and the other one opens half under the deck, and so doesn’t offer much in the way of bulk fresh air flow). Then she suggested that we get a fan, thinking that airflow would dry up the water and stop the mold. “Opening the door to the furnace room should also help,” she said “because before the renovations there was no door there.” We were not about to leave that door open full time, for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that there’s no reason why that would help clear the mold in that room (as opposed to spreading it through the rest of the house, as well as giving the cat a way in to roll in the mold and get herself disgusting). Then, to prompt us to use a fan, she came by and dropped one off (a very obviously used fan that was probably just sitting around her basement).

She’s been quite laissez-faire about the whole thing, saying things like “well, it’s and old house, and that’s just what happens to them.” Old houses might be susceptible to mold invasions, but that’s not an inevitable fate of older homes. There are many gorgeous century old homes in this neighbourhood, and with proper upkeep they’re quite habitable. When Wayfare pointed out that we both have mold allergies, she said something along the lines of “well, you hardly ever use the basement anyway, so can’t you just get like a surgical mask and wear that whenever you go down?” That was particularly not helpful.

A dehumidifier has been one good suggestion, and we tried that. There’s an old one hanging around in the furnace room that was purportedly used by the previous tenant to solve the water-coming-through-the-walls issue, but I didn’t trust it (I figured it was probably just full of mold waiting to be blown around), so I bought a new one. We ran it for two days and despite the fact that there were visible water droplets on the wall, it didn’t take any moisture out of the air — either high humidity is not the problem (and it doesn’t feel that humid in there), or the room is too cold for a dehumidifier to be effective. So we managed to return it, since it wasn’t helping. She bought us another one now anyway, but we have to go up to Sears and pick it up (if I thought it would actually do something, I wouldn’t mind…).

Then, Wayfare went by her office to drop off our rent cheque, and our landlord was all excited. She had bought something for the house:

A big thing of vinegar, and two boxes of baking soda. Yes, we will have a giant carbon dioxide volcano and that will fix our mold problems. She figures somehow that if bleach didn’t kill the mold, vinegar will (“it’s a handy household cleaner” — yeah, it is… for windows), and the baking soda will help remove the smell of death!

Me, I figure that combined with some red and green food colouring, we just got a cool Halloween prop. (Who wants to see the vampire bubble blood? Who wants to see the doll projectile volcano vomit?).

No word yet one when she’ll get someone who knows something about mold to take a look at the situation (her admittedly unreliable step son is supposed to come by some time before the end of the year to look at the problem and suggest further craziness). We’re starting to wonder if we should cut her out of the loop and start talking to her husband, who seems to have a clue but simply doesn’t care as much. My dad says that mold can be bad for the resale value of a house, and also for the health of its occupants, and if she’s dragging her feet like this then we should go over her head to a tenants’ protection association of some sort, or hire a mold specialist ourselves, without convincing her of the necessity first, and then just sending the bill to her.

There was an article in the London Free Press today about a lack of skilled workers in the city. (Note: the LFP has pretty terrible online retention, this article may not be accessible after a week).

A London company is poised to grow, hiring as sales increase — but it will have to expand outside the city.

Autodata Solutions is an example of how the shortage of skilled workers is hurting the city’s economic growth.
…
In fact, 62 per cent of companies said they faced a shortage of qualified candidates and another 29 per cent said they had trouble finding people to relocate here.
…
The most ambitious of the plans is to bring more than 1,000 students from Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario to the London Convention Centre in January to meet with businesses looking for workers.
…
For companies such as Autodata Solutions, which cannot find software developers, the labour shortage has had a serious effect.
…
Over the last year, the company has hired about 100, and it now employs about 200.

“The problem is we do not need people out of school. We need workers with three to five years’ experience. The issue is skill,” said Lisa Harrison, director of human resources. “I would prefer to grow here; we love London, we’d be happier if we could find people here.”

[Emphasis mine]

This is just retarded. It’s not that there’s a shortage of skilled workers: this is a university town, with way more skilled workers graduating every year than the city can possibly hire all by itself. The problem is with a lack of skilled, experienced workers. But companies have to realize that someone has to hire recent grads in order for them to get skilled. Yes, they’ll need a bit more training, but they also cost less at first, so it’s a bit of an investment, really. After all, someone with 3 years seniority at another company will still need to be trained to the specificities of your company. It might take only a few months instead of a year or two, but it will hardly take 3 years for a recent grad to actually catch up in the experience specific to your company. If nobody in the city hires recent grads, then the grads move away. And once they move, it’s very hard to get them to come back. While many students may come here with a plan to move to Toronto as soon as their finals are done, there must be a substantial portion who would stay if they had a local job offer within weeks of graduation.

As one advances in life beyond graduation, one tends to settle down, start a family, etc. Once that happens, it becomes hard to convince one to move cities for a job. Especially considering how difficult the “two-body problem” is to solve in London. If I am a talented, experienced software engineer, there may be a nice selection of jobs for me. But if my wife is a teacher or librarian, then there might be no work for her, and I might instead try to find a job for myself in a larger city like Toronto or Ottawa, where we could both find jobs. These factors make it much harder to lure someone away from another city as they progress in life, and again the solution appears to be hiring recent grads and training them up within the company. Get them while they’re single, then keep them while they put down roots here, and it might even help reduce turn over down the road.

If indeed this one company in London has hired 100 skilled employees over the last year, how many of those really needed to be veterans, and how many could have been trained in house? If they have a need for another 100 in the next year or two, how much easier and how much sooner could those positions be filled with local recent grads than job searches abroad? Is it better to have a position lay vacant for a year while one searches for an experienced employee than it is to hire a fresh employee and have them trained up by the end of that year?

And, moreover, how much does training cost vs. opening another branch?

The company is looking to add branches outside London and is considering the United States, Guelph and Windsor, where there are workers.

“Our growth will not be in London and the skills shortage here is a big part of the issue,” Harrison said.

There may be skilled workers in Guelph and Windsor at the moment, but with cities that are even smaller than London, how stable is that job market/pool of workers?